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And by my side, in battle true,

A thousand warriors drew the shaft?
Ah! there in desolation cold,

The desert serpent dwells alone,

Where grass o'ergrows each mouldering bone,
And stones themselves to ruin grown,
Like me, are death-like old.

Then seek we not their camp,—for there

The silence dwells of my despair!

XXXIX.

“But hark, the trump!-to-morrow thou
In glory's fires shalt dry thy tears:
E'en from the land of shadows now
My father's awful ghost appears,
Amidst the clouds that round us roll!
He bids my soul for battle thirst—
He bids me dry the last—the first—
The only tears that ever burst
From Outalissi's soul;

Because I may not stain with grief
The death-song of an Indian chief!"

WYOMING.*

BY FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

"Dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux, mais ne les y cherchez pas."

ROUSSEAU.

I.

THOU Com'st, in beauty, on my gaze at last,
"On Susquehanna's side, fair Wyoming !"
Image of many a dream, in hours long past,
When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring
Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes,
As by the poet borne, on unseen wing,

I breathed, in fancy, 'neath thy cloudless skies,
The summer's air, and heard her echoed harmonies.

II.

I then but dreamed: thou art before me now,

In life, a vision of the brain no more.

* The allusion in the following stanzas can be understood by those only who have read Campbell's beautiful poem, "GERTRUDE OF WYOMING :" but who has not read it?

I've stood upon the wooded mountain's brow,
That beetles high thy lovely valley o'er ;

And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore,
Within a bower of sycamores am laid;

And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore

The fragrance of wild flowers through sun and shade, Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my

head.

III.

Nature hath made thee lovelier than the power
Even of Campbell's pen hath pictured: he
Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour
Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery

With more of truth, and made each rock and tree
Known like old friends, and greeted from afar:
And there are tales of sad reality,

In the dark legends of thy border war, With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude's are.

IV.

But where are they, the beings of the mind,
The bard's creations, moulded not of clay,
Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned—
Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave—where are
they?

We need not ask. The people of to-day
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough,

And hospitable too-for ready pay;

With manners like their roads, a little rough,

And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.

Judge

V.

who keeps the toll-bridge gate,

And the town records, is the Albert now

Of Wyoming like him, in church and state,
Her Doric column; and upon his brow

The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow,
Look patriarchal. Waldegrave 'twere in vain
To point out here, unless in yon scare-crow,
That stands full-uniformed upon the plain,
To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the
grain.

VI.

For he would look particularly droll

In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume,"
And be the wonder of each Christian soul,

As of the birds that scare-crow and his broom.
But Gertrude, in her loveliness and bloom,

Hath

many a model here; for woman's eye,

In court or cottage, wheresoe'er her home,
Hath a heart-spell too holy and too high
To be o'erpraised even by her worshipper-Poesy.

VII.

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There's one in the next field—of sweet sixteen— Singing and summoning thoughts of beauty born In heaven with her jacket of light green, "Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,' Without a shoe or stocking-hoeing corn. Whether, like Gertrude, she oft wanders there, With Shakspeare's volume in her bosom borne, I think is doubtful. Of the poet-player The maiden knows no more than Cobbett or Voltaire.

VIII.

There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old, Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped Upon their day of massacre. She told Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept, Whereon her father and five brothers slept Shroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave, When all the land a funeral mourning kept. And there, wild laurels planted on the grave By Nature's hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave.

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